grocery shrink ray

The grocery shrink ray is a phenomenon that you may have noticed, where companies make their packaged products slightly smaller, charge the same price, and hope that no one notices. It’s not a new phenomenon, but the Office for National Statistics in the United Kingdom recently tallied up shrunken products in the last five years. [More]

When companies slightly reduce the size of a product instead of raising the price, that’s called the Grocery Shrink Ray. It’s often deployed at the same time as a packaging redesign to make the shrinkage harder to notice. Two brands from Procter & Gamble, Febreze and Cascade, have done this with their products recently, and our observant readers noticed. [More]

When food companies shave a little bit of their product off to save money and avoid a price hike, that’s called the Grocery Shrink Ray. We’ve followed how it’s been blasting through food products for over 100 years now, and it made two small hits in Dannon brand yogurt and Aldi’s store-brand sea salt. [More]

If you’re expecting guests for the holidays, you might pick up some bagels and tubs of flavored cream cheese to feed them. An 8-ounce tub of Philadelphia cream cheese soon won’t go as far as it used to: tubs that have been hit with the Grocery Shrink Ray and downsized to 7.5 ounces have been spotted in stores. [More]

It’s always a gamble when companies mess with a product beloved by consumers, as Mondelez found out when it decided to change the shape of its Toblerone chocolate bar in the U.K., pulling a bit of a Grocery Shrink Ray move in the process. [More]

Did you think that the Grocery Shrink Ray was a modern phenomenon? It turns out that shrinking down food and hoping that no one notices is a venerable tradition, and was front-page news in Seattle a century ago. [More]

The Grocery Shrink Ray is what happens when a company wants to cut their expenses, but not raise their prices. Pepsodent is a bargain-brand toothpaste that you can pick up in most stores for $1, but reader Tony noticed something when he bought his last tube: it was half an ounce smaller than the previous one, which he still had handy. [More]

It wasn’t all that long ago that ice cream was sold in actual half gallons, instead of containers of 1.5 to 1.75 quarts… or even smaller. Blue Bunny, a brand that has generally stayed at the higher end of the range, used a recent package redesign to mask shrinkage down to 46 ounces, or 1.44 quarts. [More]

Megan was shopping for cheese at Target over the weekend, as many sensible people do, and she noticed something strange about the pre-sliced packages of Sargento cheddar. It came in two different sizes, which had the same price. Yes, it turns out that one of them was the victim of the Grocery Shrink Ray, taking the total from 20 slices to 18, depriving customers of enough slices to make an entire grilled cheese sandwich. UPDATE: The different sizes may represent different package sizes between cheddar types, which is confusing. [More]

Chris wrote to Consumerist upset about one of his favorite desserts, Pepperidge Farm’s Milano cookies. The cookies seemed smaller, he said, estimating that they had “reduced the size of the cookies by about 25%.” Was that true? We took his question to the brand’s headquarters, which is not in a farmhouse in Maine. [More]

Good morning! It’s time to stumble to your kitchen and make something caffeinated to aim at your mouth. One handy way to do that when you’re especially sleepy is to buy pre-mixed iced coffee or espresso and milk drinks at a grocery or discount store. Only Starbucks, a popular maker of those drinks, has shrink rayed an entire serving out of their iced espresso drinks. [More]

One of the nice things about Justin’s brand nut butters is that they come in a jar that’s a full 16 ounces. Except, reader EC learned recently, at Walmart. Since his last purchase of a nut butter jar last year, the packaging has changed… and so has the volume of almond butter in the jar. [More]

Earlier this week, we shared a reader’s photo of the new and larger scoop in her box of Tide detergent. Normally, we’d be happy when a company offers something bigger, but in this case it appeared that Tide-maker Procter & Gamble was trying to make customers use more detergent and finish off their boxes faster. Someone from the company’s “Fabric Care Communications” team reached out to explain why they made this change. [More]

Reader N. has some laundry that’s pretty dirty. She has a toddler, who uses cloth diapers. Yet she’s never used more than one scoop of her preferred detergent, Tide powder. She was surprised recently to open up the box and find a bigger scoop inside the box. Who needs this much detergent? Is Procter & Gamble trying to get customers to overdose on suds? [More]

It’s not just food that the Grocery Shrink Ray hits: we’ve seen it strike everything from grooming products to warranties. We haven’t ever seen a Christmas label shrink ray, though, until Dave sent these pictures comparing labels purchased at Walmart during different years. [More]